couldn't last. For almost a lap, so hopped up was I, I managed to stay out in front of Skid and Steve and the trailing field. Then they began to inch their way up, picking up pace, high-blasting into the corners and out again, the two blackened hulks of the burned-out rockets marking the laps like death-stones.

They crept up and went out in front. They took a corner locked together, sliding until they almost skimmed the outside fence. They came swinging back, Skid's blue rocket skidding dangerously close in front of me, his blast driving me to the side.

And then I began to get it. I began to understand that headlong pace, and the shock of understanding drove all the exhilaration of speed out of me. Those two maniacs weren't riding a race, they were having themselves a duel—fighting it out for a girl there at the top of the tube. I hung on grimly, my eyes almost popping from my head, waiting for the crack-up that this killing speed was bound to bring.

It came with millisecond suddenness. I saw Steve claw his big space-black rocket over the way a marsh-grafk pulls over just before he charges. The tail of his rocket whipped once with a sort of challenging motion. Then he gunned straight for Skid.

I braked, momentum driving my harness deep into my ribs. Through the screen of my bow jets I caught a blurred impression of streaking color. Out of that blur Skid's ship came plunging, starting a horrible side slip toward the fence. Just before it hit, it straightened out, its crumpled jets somehow managing to compensate for the slide.

And out of that blur Steve's Space Ace also came hurtling. It pinwheeled end over end, spraying out sparks like a crazy lightning bug. Only it didn't straighten out. It slammed into the force fence, drawing a red hot streak from bow to stern. It raised a screech that must have drowned out the single horrified roar from the stands as it nosed along the fence, its starboard jet out of commission, its port firing at full blast and holding it to the fence with relentless pressure. And inside his rocket Steve was slowly frying to death.

In a thousand nightmares I had seen that thing happen over and over again until it came to have a terrible familiarity about it. I didn't even have to think—there wouldn't have been time for that. When I acted it was in a precision pattern that had been acid-etched in my brain one afternoon on the force fence at Zeta park. Just like Captain Space in the video color cartoon I set sail for the ventro-fin of Steve's smoking 

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